Sawston and Sawston Hall
Right next to the medieval church of St Mary, Sawston stands one of the most important buildings in the history of Catholic England – Sawston Hall.
The hall is a handsome Tudor manor house, with none of the later additions and rebuildings that you find with so many other houses from the period. There is a reason for that and it is closely tied to the central role the hall played in the dramatic events of 1553, when a coup attempt led by the Duke of Northumberland tried to prevent the accession to the throne of the Catholic Mary Tudor and to supplant her with the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. Had the duke succeeded, the whole of British history would have been different: Sawston played a crucial role in ensuring he didn’t.
The Lady Jane Grey coup
The Reformation period in England was a deeply traumatic time for everyone, when every certainty ordinary people had ever known – the permanence of the Church and its teachings, what you needed to do to get into Heaven, even the use of the land and the value of the money in your pocket – were thrown into the air, apparently by order of the king and his ministers in London. It is no wonder that on occasion people rose in protest. The changes in religion started when Henry VIII, desperate for a son to succeed him and unable to get one with his wife, Katharine of Aragon, got parliament to declare England independent of the papacy and himself Supreme Head of the English Church, so he could annul his own marriage and marry his lover, Anne Boleyn. Soon parliament was also laying down exactly what form church worship should take, what its theology should be, and even who should succeed Henry after his death. Henry had finally had a son, Prince Edward, by his third wife, Jane Seymour, and he became King Edward VI when Henry died. But Edward was young and in poor health: who should succeed to the throne should Edward die without an heir (as, indeed, he did)? Parliament had decided that the next in line should be Edward’s elder sisters, Mary (daughter of Katharine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (daughter of Anne Boleyn), and if they were to die without heirs – as also happened – the throne should pass to their cousins, the Grey sisters, starting with the eldest, Lady Jane Grey. What parliament did not take into account was religion.
Edward VI was a convinced and devoted Protestant, as was his cousin Lady Jane Grey. His sister Mary, however, clung firmly to her Catholic faith, and Edward and his chief minister, the Duke of Northumberland, feared – rightly – that if Mary came to the throne she would reverse all the religious changes, restore Catholic practices and return England to loyalty to the papacy. To prevent that happening, Edward came up with the idea of altering the line of succession, to by-pass Mary and Elizabeth (no-one was quite sure what her religious views were) and make Lady Jane Grey Edward’s direct heir. Northumberland also engineered a quick marriage between Jane and his youngest son, Lord Guildford Dudley. When Edward died and Jane became Queen, Northumberland would be the real power behind the throne. All he needed to do was act fast as soon as Edward was on his deathbed.
At first the coup seemed to work. Even before Edward was dead, Northumberland sent troops to escort Mary to London, where he intended to confine her to the Tower; meanwhile, he persuaded the Royal Council and the senior judges to declare Jane Grey Queen. But then Sawston Hall played its part.
Queen Mary at Sawston
Mary narrowly avoided falling into Northumberland’s trap – she got a tip-off from Catholics at court and turned round to head for her estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, where she could raise an armed force to challenge the duke. First she had to get there, though. She headed towards Cambridge, intending to stay the night, but the university town was risky; although it had many Catholics, the university was Protestant and the Duke of Northumberland was its Chancellor: there was little chance she could stay a night and not be spotted and detained. It was probably Andrew Huddleston, one of her entourage, who suggested she head instead to Sawston, about seven miles south of Cambridge, where his cousin Sir John Huddleston and his wife Lady Bridget, both Catholics, could put her up at their house, Sawston Hall.
Mary arrived on the night of 7 July 1553; meanwhile Northumberland’s men, led by his son Lord Robert Dudley, arrived to look for her in Cambridge. There are many stories about what happened next. What is certain is that she left early the next morning, and it is highly likely that she heard mass said by the priest of the church next door before she went; what is highly unlikely is that she wasted time dressing up as a servant, as local legend has it – she needed to get on the road and dig her spurs in. Lord Robert and his men soon guessed where she had been and arrived at the Hall about an hour too late. Local legand further has it that they too wasted precious time, this time by setting fire to the Hall; Mary, apparently making the most leisurely of escapes, is supposed to have looked back, seen the smoke, and commented that she would one day rebuild Huddleston’s house. None of this is remotely believable: Mary was heading to Norfolk for dear life while Dudley, uncertain as to what to do, returned to Cambridge to await further instructions from his father. Mary reached her estates in Norfolk, from where she sent an angry and defiant message to the Council in London commanding their obedience; Northumberland charged off with an armed force to capture her, and it was almost certainly he who set fire to Sawston Hall – a punitive act of vengeance to deter other possible supporters of Mary which was entirely in his character. However, Mary had succeeded in gathering formidable support in East Anglia, while in London the members of the Council suddenly remembered urgent appointments, made their excuses and slipped away, leaving Jane Grey and her husband isolated. Out-manoeuvred, Northumberland had to concede defeat and he actually declared Mary Queen in Cambridge market place on 20 July. Mary’s men arrested him the same day.
What if Lord Robert Dudley and his men had caught Mary at Sawston, which they might easily have done? Mary would not have become Queen, and neither would her sister Elizabeth, whom Edward and Northumberland also wanted to exclude: instead, the Greys would have ruled and almost certainly made England a much more Protestant country, broadly along the lines of the Kirk in Scotland. Moreover, with the Greys on the throne, there would almost certainly have been no Stuart monarchy, no union of the Crowns, no Puritans leaving for America – it’s easy to see how enormous the potential consequences for British history, and even American and world history, could have been had Mary not been able to stay one night with the Catholic Huddlestons of Sawston Hall.
Sawston and its Priest Hole(s)
Queen Mary ruled for five years (1553-1558). She did indeed restore the Catholic faith in England and historians have long recognised that, despite the persecution and burnings of Protestants that inevitably stained her reputation, the restoration was overwhemingly popular and well received. She granted permission for Sir John Huddleston to rebuild his house using stone from the now-redundant Cambridge Castle. Huddleston died in 1557 and the following year Mary died and was succeeded by her younger sister Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s parliament brought in yet another set of rules for religion, this time designed to be acceptable both to Catholics and Protestants: the Church of England retained many Catholic practices and the Queen was its ‘Supreme Governor’ rather than its ‘Head’. In practice, most Elizabethan Justices turned a blind eye to their neighbours’ Mass-going as long as they didn’t challenge the Queen and occasionally put in appearance at their local church, but the situation changed radically when Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570; overnight every Catholic in the land became a potential traitor. The Elizabethan government started to apply pressure to Catholics, with increasingly severe fines for ‘recusancy’ (refusing the Established Church of England); since it is very difficult for Catholics to maintain their faith without access to a priest, the regime also targeted priests, especially when under-cover missionary priests began arriving from the training school at Douai in northern France, followed in 1580 by the first English Jesuit missionaries. With the King of Spain gathering his forces to invade, Catholic priests were to be hunted down as agents of a foreign power, charged with seducing English people from their proper loyalty to their sovereign. In this new war of religion, Sawston Hall found itself in the front line.
John Huddleton’s son and heir, Edmund Huddleston, seems to have tried to reach a compromise with the regime, but his mother, the formidable Lady Bridget, was having none of it. She not only resisted all attempts to force her to conform to the Queen’s Church, but it was probably she who commissioned the remarkable Nicholas Owen to construct a hiding hole in Sawston Hall where a priest could hide. Owen’s priest holes are generally regarded as masterpieces – no simple sliding panels or trapdoors for him. The Sawston Hall priest hole is one of his most ingenious: it is cleverly built into the turn of a stone staircase, and although the entrance hole seems small, inside it is surprisingly roomy. The hole was needed because in the 1580s and 1590s, as the Spanish invasion threat grew more menacing, the search for Catholic priests intensified: they could now be tortured and executed for treason, while recusancy fines became crippling. Houses like Sawston, where Mass could be held in secret for people from miles around, became vital centres for keeping the Catholic faith alive. Not surprisingly Sawston Hall seems to have been searched many times, but even though priests hidden at Sawston included the prominent Jesuit John Gerard and there may at times have been as many as three Catholic priests hiding there (other, less ingenious hiding places have been found), none was ever caught there. Lady Bridget and her grandchildren Henry and Jane Huddleston, remained firm Catholics even in the face of the restrictions, and it was probably Jane who undertook the risky task of conveying food to the hidden priests while evading the watching eyes of the government’s agents.
Despite Edmund’s attempts to tread a middle path, Sawston did not escape tragedy during this period of persecution. In 1600, his daughter, the widowed Mrs Fortescue, received a summons to the Old Bailey to answer a charge of recusancy. She was ill and Edmund asked his steward, John Rigby, to go down to London to represent her. Instead, the court questioned Rigby about his own religious beliefs, with the result that he was himself arrested, imprisoned, and, since he refused to conform with the Elizabethan Church, he was hanged, drawn and quartered (i.e., hanged until not quite dead, then his body was cut open and, once he was finally dead, it was cut in four pieces and displayed as a warning to others). Nicholas Owen was eventually caught and died under excuciating torture. Jane Huddleston was also arrested and was to be subjected to death by peine forte et dure – being crushed under heavy stones – though Queen Elizabeth seems to have interceded to spare her and she was instead imprisoned in the Tower, from where she was released by James I. Any hopes Catholics might have had that the new reign would put an end to their persecution, however, were destroyed after the disastrous failed Gunpowder Plot to assassinate the King and murder the entire parliament. Jane’s brother Henry Huddleston, though not involved in the Plot, was good friends with many who were and so was caught up in the wave of arrests that followed it. He was lucky to escape with his life, but the Huddlestons of Sawston faced crippling recusancy fines, which go a long way towards explaining why their house could not be updated or extended after its rebuilding in Bridget Huddleston’s day – they simply could not afford it. By the eighteenth century it was as much as they could to keep the place watertight. Their fortunes recovered to some extent, but by the end of the nineteenth century, like many other landed families, they were finding the expenses of maintaining a large estate too expensive to bear and they had to start the process of selling the land off. Finally, in 1982, the Huddlestons sold the Hall itself and the long story of the Huddlestons of Sawston Hall came to a close.
Sean Lang